Ultra-Vaxxed Israel’s Crisis Is a Dire Warning to America
The massive surge of COVID-19 infections in Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries on earth, is pointing to a complicated path ahead for America.
In June, there were several days with zero new COVID infections in Israel. The country launched its national vaccination campaign in December last year and has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 80 percent of citizens above the age of 12 fully inoculated. COVID, most Israelis thought, had been defeated. All restrictions were lifted and Israelis went back to crowded partying and praying in mask-free venues.
Fast forward two months later: Israel reported 9,831 new diagnosed cases on Tuesday, a hairbreadth away from the worst daily figure ever recorded in the country—10,000—at the peak of the third wave. More than 350 people have died of the disease in the first three weeks of August. In a Sunday press conference, the directors of seven public hospitals announced that they could no longer admit any coronavirus patients. With 670 COVID-19 patients requiring critical care, their wards are overflowing and staff are at breaking point.
“I don’t want to frighten you,” coronavirus czar Dr. Salman Zarka told the Israeli parliament this week. “But this is the data. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t lie.”
(More on the link)
.
I don't know if I would call Israel 'ultra-vaxxed', exactly. They took a strong early lead, but have since fallen by the wayside in the global rankings of vaccine coverage:
Their rate of vaccination slowed to a crawl until recently. Between April and August, they vaccinated hardly anyone:
There has been a recent uptick. This is likely due to their booster programme.
The article mentions that nearly 80% of over-12s have received the vaccine. However, Israel has a proportionally large population of children, and children spread the Delta variant just as easily as anyone else:
Association of Age and Pediatric Household Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Infection
Young children are less likely to bring the virus into the home than older children, but present a greater transmission risk if they do bring it in. The difference is likely down to behaviour, and not biology.
The Delta variant has a basic reproduction number that is over the threshold under which the vaccines we have are able to confer herd immunity. The vaccines do not provide perfect protection to those who receive them, particularly among the elderly and the immune-compromised. These are all things that we knew a long time ago, or could have predicted from what we knew.